As it is known in cryptology, codification techniques (such as encryption) using standard and evolving computerized computations or algorithms are developed so that data exposed to undesirable third parties are concealed making it difficult (and intended to be impossible) for an unauthorized third party to see or use it. Usually, for encryption, the term ‘plaintext’ refers to a text which has not been coded or encrypted. In most cases the plaintext is usually directly readable, and the terms ‘cipher-text’ or ‘encrypted text’ are used to refer to text that has been coded or “encrypted”. Encryption experts also assert that, despite the name, “plaintext”, the word is also synonymous with textual data and binary data, both in data file and computer file form. The term “plaintext” also refers to serial data transferred, for example, from a communication system such as a satellite, telephone or electronic mail system. Terms such as ‘encryption’ and ‘enciphering’, ‘encrypted’ and ‘ciphered’, ‘encrypting device’ and ‘ciphering device’, ‘decrypting device’ and ‘decipher device’ have an equivalent meaning within cryptology and are herein used to describe devices and methods that include encryption and decryption techniques.
There is an increasing need for security in communications over public and private networks. The expanding popularity of the Internet, and especially the World Wide Web, have lured many more people and businesses into the realm of network communications. There has been a concomitant rapid growth in the transmission of confidential information over these networks. As a consequence, there is a critical need for improved approaches to ensuring the confidentiality of private information.
Network security is a burgeoning field. There are well known encryption algorithms, authentication techniques and integrity checking mechanisms which serve as the foundation for today's secure communications. For example, public key encryption techniques using RSA and Diffie-Hellman are widely used. Well known public key encryption techniques generally described in the following U.S. Pat. No. 4,200,770 entitled, Cryptographic Apparatus and Method, invented by Hellman, Diffie and Merkle; U.S. Pat. No. 4,218,582 entitled, Public Key Cryptographic Apparatus and Method, invented by Hellman and Merkle; U.S. Pat. No. 4,405,829 entitled Cryptographic Communications System and Method, invented by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,424,414 entitled, Exponentiation Cryptographic Apparatus and Method, invented by Hellman and Pohlig. For a general discussion of network security, refer to Network and Internetwork Security, by William Stallings, Prentice Hall, Inc., 1995.
In spite of the great strides that have been made in network security, there still is a need for further improvement. For example, with the proliferation of heterogeneous network environments in which different host computers use different operating system platforms, there is an increasing need for a security mechanism that is platform independent. Moreover, with the increasing sophistication and variety of application programs that seek access to a wide range of information over networks, there is an increasing need for a security mechanism that can work with many different types of applications that request a wide variety of different types of information from a wide variety of different types of server applications. Furthermore, as security becomes more important and the volume of confidential network transactions expands, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that security can be achieved efficiently, with minimal time and effort.
The creation of proprietary digital information is arguably the most valuable intellectual asset developed, shared, and traded among individuals, businesses, institutions, and countries today. This information is mostly defined in electronic digital formats, e.g., alphanumeric, audio, video, photographic, scanned image, etc. It is well known that a large number of encryption schemes have been used for at least the last 100 years and deployed more frequently since the onset of World Wars I and II. Since the beginning of the cold war, the “cat and mouse” spy missions have further promulgated the need for secure encryption devices and associated systems.
Simultaneously, there has been an increased need for mobility of transmissions including data and signals by physical or logical transport between home and office, or from office to office(s) among designated recipients. The dramatic increase in the velocity of business transactions and the fusion of business, home, and travel environments has accelerated sharing of this proprietary commercial, government, and military digital information. To facilitate sharing and mobility, large amounts of valuable information may be stored on a variety of portable storage devices (e.g., memory cards, memory sticks, flash drives, optical and hard disc magnetic media) and moved among home and office PCs, portable laptops, PDAs and cell phones, and data and video players and recorders. The physical mobility of these storage devices makes them vulnerable to theft, capture, loss, and possible misuse. Indeed, the storage capacity of such portable storage devices is now approaching a terabyte, sufficient to capture an entire computer operating environment and associated data. This would permit copying a targeted computer on the storage media and replicating the entire data environment on an unauthorized “virgin” computer or host device.
Another trend in data mobility is to upload and download data on demand over a network, so that the most recent version of the data is always accessible and can be shared only with authorized users. This facilitates the use of “thin client” software and minimizes the cost of storing replicated versions of the data, facilitates the implementation of a common backup and long-term storage retention and/or purging plan, and may provide enhanced visibility and auditing as to who accessed the data and the time of access, as may be required for regulatory compliance. However, thin client software greatly increases the vulnerability of such data to hackers who are able to penetrate the firewalls and other mechanisms, unless the data is encrypted on the storage medium in such a way that only authorized users could make sense of it, even if an unauthorized user were able to access the encrypted files.
There is a balance among legal, economic, national security, and pragmatic motivations to develop robust security implementations and policies to protect the storage of proprietary digital information, based on the value of the information, the consequences of its exposure or theft, and the identification and trust associated with each of the targeted recipients. In order to provide such varying degrees of protection for portable storage devices, system methods and application functionality must be developed and easily integrated into the operating procedures of the relevant institutions. Different policies defining degrees of protection are required to economically accommodate and adapt to a wide range of targeted recipient audiences for this data.
Known encryption systems for these devices include the “Data Encryption Standard” (“DES”), which was initially standardized by the “American National Bureau of Standards”, currently “National Institute of Standards and Technology” (“NBS” or “NIST”) in the United States. Another includes the “Fast data encipherment algorithm FEAL” (FEAL) developed later in Japan, and described in the IECEJ Technical Report IT 86-33. U.S. Pat. No. 5,214,703 entitled “Device for the Conversion of a Digital Block and Use of Same” describes the use of additional devices as does an encryption device described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,675,653 entitled “Method and Apparatus for Digital Encryption”. In most cases, the user making use of protecting the data after encryption or enciphering of a plaintext has delegated the strength of the invulnerability of the encryption to be positioned in front of an enemy attack. This positioning is aimed to discover the contents of the cipher text or the encryption key used, trusting in the organizations, institutions, or experts endorsing their security and providing a degree of confusion and diffusion of values introduced by the encryption device used in the cipher text. The user encrypting a particular plaintext has no objective security regarding the degree of confusion and diffusion of values present in a cipher text that result from the application of the encryption device. Attacks on personal computers and commercial, government and military data are now commonplace; indeed, identity theft of passwords is the largest white-collar crime in the United States. Yet passwords and PINs (Personal Identification Numbers), in most cases generated by human beings who are tempted to use native-language words, Social Security Numbers, telephone numbers, etc., are still the most used access security methods for protecting portable encryption devices, and among the most vulnerable to both brute force dictionary attacks as well as sophisticated logic tracing. Professional criminal attackers and even amateur hackers now have access to sophisticated software and supercomputing networks that can unknowingly invade processing devices and storage devices, trace software instruction sequences and memory locations, and by knowing or discovering the algorithms being used, intercept and copy encryption keys, PINs, and other profile data used to protect the access to stored content. They can exploit vulnerabilities in the underlying commercial software, or in the construction of the integrated circuit chips housing and executing the cryptographic processes, or in the specialized cryptographic software, which enables exposing keys and access parameters at some deterministic point in the processing sequence. Industrial laboratory facilities are also available to read the data content stored in memory cells by measuring the electronic charge through the use of electronic beam microscopes, and thus steal stored PINs, keys, and therefore access the previously protected data.
Many prior art methods exist for the key management protection necessary for securing key encryption keys for large groups of users. Split-key secret sharing schemes have been proposed whereby the decryption key is split and shared among multiple parties or entities to be combined to reconstitute the decryption key. In these cases, however, the individual secret shares themselves are maintained statically in multiple storage devices, generally on-line, where they are susceptible to attackers, particularly from within the institution, who can target the secret shares and recombine then to form the decryption key. Such solutions are often implemented for relatively static configurations of computing and storage devices and related communities of interest or tiers of users, and have not addressed the ability to so protect key encrypting keys when the data itself, and the means to encrypt and decrypt the data and to generate and recombine the shared secrets, are on a portable device.
Current file encryption systems provide a technique for a general-purpose computer to encrypt or decrypt computer-based files. Current encryption and decryption techniques typically rely on lengthy strings (e.g., 1024 bits, 2048 bits, 4096 bits, or more) to provide for secure encryption or decryption of files. Computer performance suffers due to the amount of data in the messages as well as the size of the encryption keys themselves.
Asymmetric file encryption systems use a different key to encrypt a file from the key used to decrypt the encrypted file. Many current file encryption systems rely on asymmetric encryption, such as those that rely on public key/private key pairs. An example of an encryption algorithm that utilizes public key/private key pairs is the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman) algorithm. Symmetric file systems use an identical key to encrypt a file as the key used to decrypt the encrypted file. Certain file encryption systems utilize a cryptographic process or random number generator to derive a random symmetric key known as the file encryption key (FEK). The FEK is used to encrypt the file. Symmetric cryptography functions up to five orders of magnitude faster than asymmetric cryptography on files. Even with a very fast key device or software that encrypts/decrypts using the asymmetric key, any such file encryption system still has to overcome the fact that asymmetric keys generally operate at orders of magnitude slower than symmetric keys. When using the file encryption key, each time a file is being authenticated, the file encryption key has to be decrypted by the asymmetric key which is time consuming, but becoming less so as computer speeds and operations are constantly improving.
What is needed are highly robust and proven security techniques incorporated into new system methods and into new commercially available portable storage hardware apparatus to implement configurable security policies for accessing information through rigorous authentication means, to secure the information with certified levels of accepted cryptographic technology, and to rigorously control the environment within which the information is shared.
In addition, there is a need to better secure portable storage apparatus and method of encrypting and sealing digital information files and storing them in the device's integral or removable memory, or alternatively on the host device's memory or other ancillary memory storage devices, while operating under cryptographically protected security policies for transport and authorized access to such digital information.
There is also a need for secure physical and logical transport of data to and from multiple recipients. To this end, it is desirable to provide a means of securely transporting data from one place to another, if the user has to carry the data or physically transport the data and the secure encryption device, and somehow communicate the information necessary to log on and access the data by another authorized user. What is required are a multiplicity of methods to securely transport the encrypted data, either physically or logically, between an Originator user and one or more Receivers.
The use of encryption devices by the general population is becoming very common in for example, commercial electronic transactions and/or electronic mail. A predominant portion of all societies want to believe in an objective, easily verified way, that the maximum degree of the diffusion and confusion (encryption) of data and data values provided by a system they are using to encrypt their data, is the superior set of encrypted devices and system.
These encrypted and decrypted data and data communications require special encryption techniques essential to denying fraudulent or otherwise unauthorized third parties with the ability to access sealed encrypted transmissions for data at rest as well as for data on the move. In all cases here within, the terms communication processor and communication processor are synonymous unless there is an illogical reference regarding use of the term communication processor in lieu of communication processor.
The present disclosure relates generally to a cryptographic management scheme that provides for network security, mobile security and specifically and more particularly relates to devices and a system for creating and manipulating encryption keys without risking the security of the key. The present disclosure addresses all of the needs described directly herein, as well as described earlier above.